Many utilities have begun the transition from using traditional analog or digital meters to installing smart meters at customer sites. These smart meters provide a number of technological advantages, one of them being the ability to communicate usage information directly with the utility. With the advent of smart meter technology the traditional utility meter reader is being replaced by automated communication methods between the utility and the smart meter directly. Once smart meters are installed in a utility's territory, there is no longer a need to send meter reading personnel to read each individual meter. A drawback of the lack of eyes in the field reading meters is the reduction of theft leads because traditionally many reports of energy theft came directly from the meter readers themselves as they were able to observe signs of meter tampering while reading the meters. The lack of eyes in the field to generate leads requires new ways to generate theft detection leads. Fortunately, smart meters provide a significant amount of data that can be used in the theft detection process, such that leads can be generated from data analysis processes instead of through direct meter visual observation.
Data analysis of steaming data is not limited to theft detection for a utility. Analogous to the streams of interval meter read data that are created by smart meters are processes outside the utility industry also creating streams of data. One can envision a series of credit card transactions as a stream of data, scans at a check-out counter for a particular cashier as a stream of data, or a series of shows watched on TV as reported by a cable box as a stream of data. These streams of data can all be monitored remotely and fused with other available data in order to evaluate the likelihood of the presence of an activity. The activity may be theft related or may be completely unrelated, such as monitoring a stream of data for signs of a change in household demographics.
Accordingly, there is a need for alternative systems, program products on machine-readable media, and methods for detecting the presence of an activity remotely by analyzing data streams along with other information available which may impact the data points in a data stream, as will be discussed in further detail below.